A Historical Perspective on Re

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255654818 A Historical Perspective on Reading Research and Practice Article · January 2004 DOI: 10.1598/0872075028.2 CITATIONS READS 94 7,625 2 authors, including: Patricia Alexander University of Maryland, College Park 269 PUBLICATIONS 11,530 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Leading Learning in Induction and Mentoring View project Learning from Multiple, Multimodal Documents View project All content following this page was uploaded by Patricia Alexander on 05 August 2014. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. From Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading. (5th ed.). © 2004 International Reading Association. 2 A Historical Perspective on Reading Research and Practice Patricia A. Alexander and Emily Fox t the time the International Reading Association was created in 1956, the reading research community was poised at a new juncture in its history A(Monaghan & Saul, 1987). The efforts of researchers during this period gave rise to extensive literature on learners and the learning process that remains an enduring legacy for the domain of reading. Yet, this was not the only period of significant change the reading community has experienced in the past 50 years. In fact, reading has periodically responded to internal and external forces resulting in both gradual and dramatic transformations to the domain— transformations that have altered reading study and practice. Our purpose here is to position those transformations within a historical framework. As with others (e.g., VanSledright, 2002), we hold that such a historical perspective allows for reasoned reflection and a certain wisdom that can be easily lost when one is im- mersed in ongoing study and practice. That is because a historical perspective broadens the vista on reading and adds a critical dimension to the analysis of present-day events and issues. To capture this historical perspective, we survey eras in reading research and practice that have unfolded in the past 50 years and that symbolize alterna- tive perspectives on learners and learning. For each era, we describe certain internal and external conditions that helped to frame that period, as well as the views and principles of learning that are characteristic of that era. Moreover, we explore both the prevailing views of learning within those periods and rival stances that existed as educational undercurrents. To bring this historical vista into focus, we highlight exemplary and prototypic works that encapsulate the issues and concerns of the time. Of course, we recognize that the boundaries and distinctions we draw between these eras are approximations of permeable and overlapping periods of reading research and practice. Nonetheless, these eras remain a useful platform from which the subsequent contributions in this volume can be explored. 33 The Era of Conditioned Learning (1950–1965) The Conditions for Change As early as the first decades of the 20th century, during the nascence of psychol- ogy, the processes of reading were already of passing interest to educational researchers (e.g., Buswell, 1922; Huey, 1908; Thorndike, 1917). However, it was not until much later in that century that reading became a recognized field of study with systematic programs of research aimed at ascertaining its fundamental nature and the processes of its acquisition. Although reading had long been a basic com- ponent of formal schooling in the United States, there was little concerted effort to marry research knowledge and instructional practice until much later in the 20th century. Instigation for that marked change came as a result of a confluence of social, educational, political, and economic factors during the 1950s. The postwar United States was a fertile ground for transformations in reading research and practice for several reasons. For one, the high birth rate during and immediately following World War II resulted in record numbers of children en- tering the public school system (Ganley, Lyons, & Sewall, 1993). This baby boom contributed to both quantitative and qualitative changes to the school population. One of the qualitative changes was a seeming rise in the number of children expe- riencing difficulties in learning to read. Such reading problems, although nothing new to teachers, took on particular significance in the age of Sputnik, as America’s ability to compete globally became a defining issue (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 2000, see #1 this volume). The outcome was a growing public pressure on the educational community to find an answer to the “problem” of reading acquisition. One of the groundbreaking but controversial publications of this period was Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It by Rudolf Flesch (1955). This book exemplified a growing interest in reading research and its rel- evance to educational practice (Ruddell, 2002). In arguments reminiscent of con- temporary debates, Flesch attacked the prevailing look-say method of reading instruction as a contributor to the reading problems experienced by many U.S. students. As the basis for his attack, Flesch referenced research that established the effectiveness of phonics-based techniques over those that relied on a whole- word approach. Before long, books such as The New Fun With Dick and Jane (Gray, Artley, & Arbuthnot, 1951), with their look-say approach, gave way to controlled vocabulary readers and synthetic phonics drill and practice in such ap- proaches as the Lippincott Basic Reading Program, Reading With Phonics, and Phonetic Keys to Reading (Chall, 1967). The burgeoning interest in finding an answer to children’s reading problems interfaced with psychological research in the guise of Skinnerian behaviorism, the prevailing research orientation at the time (Goetz, Alexander, & Ash, 1992). With its promise of bringing a scientific perspective to the reading “problem,” behaviorism seemed suited to the task at hand (Glaser, 1978). In effect, it 34 Alexander and Fox was time to turn the attention of the research community to the fundamental task of learning to read and apply the same principles of analysis that explained and controlled the behavior of animals in the laboratory to children’s language learning. Such an analysis would presumably result in pedagogical techniques based on an understanding of the physiological and environmental underpinnings of human behavior (Glaser, 1978). Based on this perspective, the processes and skills involved in learning to read could be clearly defined and broken down into their constituent parts. Those constituent parts could then be practiced and reinforced in a systematic and orderly fash- ion during classroom instruction (Pearson & Stephens, 1994). With this analytic view, there was a growing tendency for problems in the reading act to be looked on as deficiencies in need of remediation, just as physical ailments require medical remedies. Indeed, it was a medical metaphor of reading, with its diagnosis, pre- scription, and remediation, that came to the foreground in the 1950s. Moreover, de- spite the claims of some within the reading research community that little of significance occurred in reading until the 1960s (Weaver & Kintsch, 1991), the con- tinued influence of behaviorism on educational practice remains evident today. Guiding View Because of the prevailing influences of behavioristic theory in educational research and practice, reading during this period was conceptualized as conditioned behavior, and just another process susceptible to programming. The Skinnerian or strict behaviorist perspective was that learning should not be conceived as growth or development, but rather as acquiring behaviors as a result of certain environmental contingencies. As Skinner (1974) stated, Everyone has suffered, and unfortunately is continuing to suffer, from mentalis- tic theories of learning in education.... The point of education can be stated in be- havioral terms: a teacher arranges contingencies under which the student acquires behavior which will be useful to him under other contingencies later on.... Education covers the behavior of a child or person over many years, and the principles of developmentalism are therefore particularly troublesome. (pp. 202–203) In this theoretical orientation, learning resulted from the repeated and controlled stimulation from the environment that came to elicit a predictable response from the individual. This repeated pairing of stimulus and response, often linked with the application of carefully chosen rewards and punishments, led to the habituation of the reading act. For example, the child presented with the symbols C-A-T immediately produces the desired word, cat, seemingly without cognitive involvement. The philosophical grounds for this stance lay in the works of the empiricist David Hume (1777/1963) and his narrow conception of knowledge as perception and learning as habituated association (Strike, 1974). The investigation of aca- demic learning, thus, involved identification of the requisite desired behaviors and A Historical Perspective on Reading Research and Practice 35 determination of the environmental conditions (i.e., training) that produced them. Depending on how strictly the behaviorist paradigm was followed, hypotheses and conclusions were more or less restricted to discussion of observable behaviors and the environmental

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